A few months ago the Friends window began reporting a unique ‘FN#’ for each account, and with a bit of ingenuity you can already sign in and out of the system, change your username, and allegedly even add contacts and hear when they sign on. People who monitor that sort of thing are also reporting that they are getting network traffic through the Friends port, even without doing any of the above tricks. It seems that the wait for in-game chat is almost over!

Something to do with Steam’s current UDP connection model. It drops the connection when there’s nothing going on, which is sensible enough when it comes to downloading content but does no favours for a chat client.

Something along those lines, anyway. Steam and Friends 3.0 are switching to TCP and a ‘persistent session’.

Andrew Simpson Says:

UDP doesn’t really have a connection model, which is kinda the problem, you have to do it yourself. God knows why they implemented Steam with UDP in the first place – UDP makes sense when you need low overhead, if all you need is raw throughput, but no certainty the message will ever get there. So it’s great for game servers and streaming media and such, and query packets, things like that.